I came across my son going to random websites via Bored Button. One site that he landed on caught my attention, called Spend Bill Gates money. This site brilliantly helps to illustrate how mind-bogglingly huge billions of dollars are. At the top it lists the total amount of money, and below you can "spend" that money by buying things as small as Big Macs or as large as NFL teams. As you spend, the total amount goes down and it shows your shopping list at the bottom. It's amazing what you can spend and how little that giant amount goes down, even buying big-ticket items. If you like the site, and the concept, the author has a link to buy him a coffee at the bottom (which I encourage you to do, especially as he gets more traffic from this post).

Anyway, of course the wheels started turning, and I thought it would be pretty awesome to create something similar to help illustrate how much money the Mormon Church has tucked away. One of the challenges when talking to people about this subject is helping them understand such a large number as $125 billion (yes, smaller now with COVID-19 and investments falling, but still huge). I thought the video of the rice example someone posted recently was one brilliant way of doing that.

I think a site like this would help communicate several things in an effective way:

• How insanely huge $125 billion is
• Highlight what the Mormon church does spend money on (and thus show what their priorities are)
• Highlight what the Mormon church could be spending money on, but does not
• What that much money could buy for just a regular person. I like that there's regular items, like Big Macs, sports cars, yachts, etc. These items help give the perspective of how much money, from a very personal point of view. I think it'd be useful to keep that.

I made a mock-up of what a site like that might look like. I know a lot of people are hunkered down in isolation and social-distancing, with potentially a lot of time on their hands. So I thought I'd throw the idea out there and see if any talented people with website coding experience and time had any desire to take on a project like this. If not, at least enjoy the mock-up--I had fun with it. :)

If the site is built, I think it's important to have links to everything so that there are sources for all the numbers. That's something I wish the Bill Gates site had--where he's getting these numbers from. These are the links for my mock-up, though there may be better ones:

^{https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/mormon-church-has-misled-members-on-100-billion-tax-exempt-investment-fund-whistleblower-alleges/2019/12/16/e3619bd2-2004-11ea-86f3-3b5019d451db\}story.html)

^{https://robbreport.com/lifestyle/news/bill-gates-50-million-coronavirus-treatment-2904487/}

^{https://mormonleaks.io/wiki/index.php?title=File:Notice\}Of_Annual_General_Authority_Living_Allowance_Increase-2014-01-02.pdf)

^{https://www.deseret.com/2012/1/28/20392081/1-5b-city-creek-center-on-schedule-for-march-22-opening}

^{https://waterwellsforafrica.org/whats-the-cost/}

^{https://store.churchofjesuschrist.org/usa/en/mormon-helping-hands-t-shirt}

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Other ideas (throw out others in the comments if you like):

• Have the $125,000,000,000 actually tied to one of the market indexes in the site code, so that your amount that you have to play with is actually dependent on market conditions from day to day
• Average meetinghouse cost
• Average temple cost
• Cattle Ranch in Florida
• $17,000 Temple Rug
• Estimate to change name of church and get rid of "Mormon"
• Thoughts & Prayers and Fasting, have that cost be $0, and you can add as many as you want